We talked about the concept of the new General Plan with the head of the developer company Sergey Bronevytskyi; learned the point of view of an expert in the field of historical heritage protection Olga Rutkovskaya; transport expert Viktor Petruk; designer Elena Fateeva, engaged in the protection of green areas of the city; representative of the development company Daria Kukharenko.
This collection of subjective opinions cannot be perceived as a sociological study, since it cannot claim any representativeness. Our goal is to simplify the task for all participants of future public hearings, discussions, and discussions and help them focus on the strengths and weaknesses of such an important document for Kyiv.
Victor Petruk
Transport expert
Victor Petruk
PRAGMATIKA.MEDIA: You have developed a reputation as one of the most consistent critics of the activities of the municipal organization "Institute of the General Plan of the City of Kyiv". Including the draft of the General Plan 2019 presented at the end of 2040, which was developed by the "Institute of the General Plan" for the Ukrainian capital. Why is he bad, what weaknesses have you noticed?
Victor Petruk: Based on the available 15-page presentation, since the full materials are not available to the public, I can say that the new General Plan 2040 is 99% copy-paste of the General Plan 2025, which has been developed by the General Plan Institute since 2008. The only visible change is the relining the names from GP 2025 to GP 2040 is a misuse of the term "agglomeration".
Why can't GP be taken in this form? First of all, it does not correspond to the approved "Kyiv Development Strategy until 2025". It so happened that the Strategy was developed and approved by the Kyiv City Council after the General Plan was developed, and it was necessary to make changes to the task of developing the GP, taking into account its main provisions. But no one did it.
The strategy assumes that Kyiv should develop as a compact city, and GP 2040 assumes the spread of the city's infrastructure into an agglomeration. The association "Kyiv Agglomeration" was created only on October 9, 2019, and already on December 16, the need to adopt the new GP 2040 was justified mainly due to the need to solve the problems of the agglomeration. On the basis of what agglomeration got into the materials of GP 2040, if the task of its development has not changed since 2008?
The Institute of General Planning predicts that by 2035, 2 million people will live in the suburban area between Koltseva and the Bolshoi Okruzhnaya Road. Moreover, the resettlement of these 2 million people will be organized according to the type of sleeping arrays, without providing jobs and social infrastructure. According to Alexei Shapoval, head of the transport infrastructure department of the "Institute of the General Plan", the city should take on the responsibility of building engineering and transport infrastructure to ensure the possibility of daily pendulum labor migration of these people to Kyiv, as well as the possibility of using the suburbs of Kyiv kindergartens and schools. This is a mistake.
If you look, for example, at the strategy of the agglomeration of "Big Paris", the main task was to move large office centers and industrial enterprises outside the city limits with the aim of saturating the suburbs with jobs and reducing the daily pendulum migration of the suburbs to Little Paris. Unfortunately, in the GP 2040 project, everything is exactly the opposite. The goal of creating an agglomeration is not to reduce the load on the transport infrastructure, but to satisfy the demand for jobs in Kyiv as much as possible. The results of the implementation of such a strategy will be catastrophic for urban mobility in Kyiv.
The new General Plan 2040 is 99% copy-paste of the General Plan 2025
GP 2040 is an extensive development plan focused on the development of new territories and the construction of the maximum possible amount of infrastructure: the removal of the airport "Kyiv" to Roslavichy, the station "Darnitsa" to Dymerk, the Kyiv river port to Ukrainka, four new bridge crossings across the Dnieper, including a railway, two subway lines, dozens of transport junctions and hundreds of kilometers of new highways and roads. And all this is completely inadequately separated from the real financial possibilities of the city and the state.
Sergey Bronevytsky estimates the cost of implementing the first phase of the General Plan at 80 billion UAH, which, of course, does not correspond to reality, since more than 50 billion UAH is needed for the construction of just one Podolsko-Vygurov metro line.
All the experts of international financial institutions cooperating with Kyiv give exactly the same recommendations - the city should develop not extensively, due to the implementation of new infrastructure mega-projects, but intensively - through small inclusive interventions in the system of urban mobility, intensification of use and optimization of management of existing infrastructure. All this gigantomania from the point of view of practical economics is absolutely ineffective in our realities.
Photo: Yury Ferendovych
PM: By the way, Sergey Bronevytskyi, when parried criticism regarding the construction of the subway, seems to have quite logically noted that the same European flagship cities are building subways at a rapid pace. We can note from ourselves that in Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Helsinki they are really actively developing the metro. So why do you think that this is contraindicated for Kyiv?
V.P.: Those cities that are limited in their ability to improve urban mobility in other ways than subways (due to the existing density and value of buildings, for example), and can afford to build subways at a rapid pace, do it. Others follow a different path. I would not call the active construction of the metro a general trend for Europe. This is rather an exception. At the same time, in Europe in the last decade, tram lines are being extremely actively reconstructed and new LRT lines are being built, which, based on the ratio of capital costs for construction and operation in terms of carrying capacity, are approximately 5-7 times more profitable than subways. Located on an area of almost 850 square meters. km Kyiv (which is 8 times the area of Paris (!) has vast territorial resources for the implementation of such systems.
The specialists of the World Bank, who in 2015 studied the possibilities of optimization of the transport system of Kyiv, gave recommendations for the creation of 8 corridors of high-speed bus communication - BRT and three lines of LRT. One of these corridors is currently not being studied by the city, and the creation of BRT and LRT systems in these corridors with the materials of GP 2040 is not foreseen. For 5 or 7 years, we have been fighting for the extension of the Borshchagovskaya tram line to the Palace of Sports - a justification has been prepared, a large analytical work has been carried out, including transport modeling, the results of which would have delighted the mayor's office of any European city, except Kyiv. The Kyiv City Hall is stubbornly opposed to the construction of this line, and it is not provided for in the materials of the State Government 2040. But GP 2040 envisages the construction of two new subway lines.
World Bank specialists gave recommendations on the creation of 8 high-speed bus corridors in Kyiv — BRT and three-line LRT
PM: Is the creation of these high-speed tram and bus lines included in the transport strategy of Kyiv's development?
V.P.: There is no separate transport strategy for Kyiv, but the Kyiv Development Strategy until 2025 includes the section "Transport and urban mobility". As the author of this section, I declare responsibly: what is written there absolutely does not correlate with the materials of GP 2040. In addition to curbing the territorial expansion of the city and the transition to a polycentric planning model, the Strategy prescribes a change in transport priorities: the development of barrier-free pedestrian spaces with engineering-equipped ground pedestrian crossings , cycling infrastructure. An extremely important element of the Strategy is to increase the transport efficiency of the existing bridge crossings over the Dnieper River by implementing Mass Rapid Transit systems in each of them, increasing the transport efficiency of sections of the street network by eliminating excess traffic capacity and distributing the transverse profile of the streets among others categories of road users — public transport and cyclists. And dozens of other important initiatives. But there is none of this in GP 2040. In it, for example, there is no such section as "Cycling infrastructure" at all. However, there are dozens of objects that do not correspond at all to the priorities of the development of urban mobility.
In fact, General Plan 2040 is a reworking of the old Soviet General Plan 1986.
Photo: Yury Ferendovych
PM: So if the new project, in your opinion, is not suitable for anywhere, then what do you propose to do with it?
V.P.: I think that there is only one way to create a good General Plan for Kyiv — to order the development of a new one. Write a new technical specification in accordance with the Kyiv Development Strategy until 2025 and progressive proposals from the World Bank for the creation of LRT and BRT corridors.
PM: But it will take at least another hour and a half, if not more. Kyiv will continue to live without approved rules and restrictions on construction, new construction scandals are inevitable...
V.P.: Experience shows that a hasty solution to urban problems in the conditions of artificially created time constraints, such as, for example, the reconstruction of the Shulyavskaya junction, which took 13 years, or the construction of the Podolsky bridge, which has already lasted 16 years, does not give a win in terms of time. As with the Shulyavskaya interchange and the Podolsky bridge, so with the new General Plan, it was wiser to take a time-out to eliminate critical contradictions. If this were done, the city would gain 10 years for the implementation of each object. The Institute of General Plan and the Department of Urban Planning and Architecture of the KSHA have been parasitizing the development of a new state-owned enterprise for years, each time speculating: "Oh, how can we live another hour without the General Plan!"
If we adopt GP 2040 in this form, the consequences for the city in the long term will be much more severe than if we lose another hour and a half to develop a new, high-quality document.
The General Plan should be developed not by a communal organization, but by an independent one
PM: How are we going to survive this hour and a half? Put up with chaos in the transport and construction spheres?
V.P.: Just like we lived without a Master Plan for the last 12 years.
We have known for a long time about the terrible imbalance of the settlement system of Kyiv. Every second able-bodied resident of the left bank does not have a job and is forced to commute to work on the right bank every day. This is our main transport problem. And what does the GP project offer as a solution? It involves the construction of the entire Vinnytsia on the left bank. Only according to the approved DPT, another 5 people are planned to be settled on the left bank in the next 7-375 years. a man without jobs. This is another Vinnitsa who will go to work on the right bank! So, in a hurry, we are forced to adopt the General Plan, which leads Kyiv to a real collapse, although this is not quite the correct term to describe the future tragedy.
The root of all the problems of the General Plan lies in the executor. Why is it not possible to develop a high-quality document, why is it that every time, again and again, we are asked to insert something ridiculous, which naturally leads to a logical confrontation with the expert environment? Because the General Plan should be developed not by a communal organization, but by an independent one. The general plan as a town-planning document is a balance of interests. And the communal association under the control of KSGA cannot provide it a priori.
Photo: Yury Ferendovych
I proposed and I propose to entrust the development of a balanced document to one of the well-known consulting companies with a high reputation: PricewaterhouseCoopers, for example, which was actually the developer of the Kyiv Development Strategy until 2025.
The master plan is just a set of urban planning calculations and justified, for the development of each of which it is rational to choose a competent profile company. Thus, the function of PW or another similar consulting company is to select a high-quality pool of co-developers of the GP and organize the necessary consulting procedures. And in this they have no equal. As a result, we will receive a balanced document of high quality, which will be supported by an expert environment. This is the best scenario for soft legitimization of the new General Plan.
